History professor authors book about civilian prisoners of war

The harrowing experiences of women held captive by the Japanese military in the war-torn South Pacific of the 40s is chronicled in a new book by a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point associate professor of history.

Theresa Kaminski is the author of "Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific," published by University Press of Kansas. The book will be released to bookstores in March and is available through on-line retailers.

"By sharing these little-known stories of perseverance and survival, Kaminski draws new profiles of courage that can inspire us half a century later," relates the publisher.

Few are aware that thousands of American civilian women and their families were imprisoned in the South Pacific from 1942 to 1945, Kaminski said. The women were wives of businessmen as well as missionaries, teachers, nurses, mothers, and, after the war started, even spies.

Confronted with so many American civilians, the Japanese were not willing to return them to the United States for security reasons, she said. The Japanese used them as possible military and diplomatic bargaining chips, even claiming that they were protecting them from Asian hostility.

The women on the islands of Borneo and Celebes, used to servants taking care of their households, were put to work in the fields for 14 hours a day with little food. Others in the Philippines were not forced into hard labor, but lived separately from their husbands and had to take care of themselves and their children.

The quality of life in the camps was poor, many captives were starving and without medicine near the end of the internment, she said. They feared being put to death, especially as the Japanese began to lose the war.

Other women profiled in the book fled to the hills or adopted new identities to avoid captivity. American entertainer Claire Phillips created an Italian identity, used her nightclub to spy on the Japanese, and passed information along to Filipino and American guerrillas by hiding documents in her brassiere.

Kaminski was inspired to write the book, the first collection of these women’s stories, after seeing a dramatization of one woman’s experience on PBS’s "Masterpiece Theatre." Because few of these women are still living, Kaminski used their memoirs, letters, biographies and other published sources for her research.

"I thought there should be one place for all of these stories," she said.

Kaminski will continue her research on this topic while on sabbatical during the 2000-01 school year and will write her second book, a biography of Ethel Herold, a Potosi, Wis., native who was held captive in the Philippines. With the help of Herold’s family, Kaminski has obtained the woman’s wartime diary and her unpublished autobiography.

Kaminski has taught U.S. history and American women’s history at UWSP since 1992. She holds degrees from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Ill., Illinois State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the daughter of Michael and Irene Kaminski of Broadview, Ill., and resides in Stevens Point with her husband, Charles Clark, and their son, Sam.

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